The invention of Thanksgiving
How did their journey begin?
Inauspiciously. The Separatists had struck a deal with investors in London: in return for seven years’ indentured labour, they would be given transport, and land in Virginia (which in those days comprised all English colonies in America). They set sail from Holland on board a small cargo ship, the Speedwell, and were joined at Southampton by the Mayflower; both ships were to cross the Atlantic together in late July. However, there were recurring concerns over the Speedwell’s seaworthiness, which delayed departure – and meant they stopped at Dartmouth for a week of further repairs. Then, some 300 miles west of Land’s End, Speedwell started leaking yet again, and both ships were forced to return to Plymouth, where the decision was finally taken to abandon Speedwell altogether and make the crossing on the Mayflower.
According to Edward Winslow, one of the Separatists
who wrote an account of Plymouth Colony, and to Wampanoag tradition, the Native Americans were not
invited to a thanksgiving feast: they heard gunshots from the colony and, assuming their allies were under attack, came to their defence in a 90-strong group, led
by Ousamequin, the Massasoit (or great sachem). There they found the Pilgrims in the midst of a noisy “rejoicing” after their first harvest, firing off weapons,
and preparing for a feast. Winslow says the Wampanoag hunted five deer, which they bestowed on Plymouth’s governor, then stayed for three days to join the feast (which probably didn’t include turkey). The Wampanoag alliance lasted decades, but it fell apart in the spectacularly bloody King Philip’s War of 1675-8. The Wampanoag were heavily defeated; Ousamequin’s son Metacomet, known as King Philip, was killed and his head displayed in Plymouth for two decades. But in the 1840s, at a time when the Pilgrims were being proclaimed as the true national founders, Winslow’s account was republished, and the 1621 feast was rediscovered as a fable of racial harmony. In 1863, during the civil war, Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a unifying national holiday.
How significant was the colony?
Plymouth Colony lasted until 1692, when it was absorbed into Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Colony (founded in 1628 by richer, non-Separatist Puritans). Even so, the Mayflower’s so-called Pilgrim Fathers have exerted a powerful hold on the American imagination. Their values of courage, hard work and self-reliance, and their ideals of religious freedom and selfrule, would be very influential on the new nation. And it is a more inspiring founding myth than the first permanent English settlement in the Americas – Jamestown, Virginia. Jamestown was established in 1607 by aristocrats and soldiers, who soon used slaves to grow tobacco and had mostly violent relations with Native Americans. Today, 35 million people claim descent from the Pilgrim Fathers. Descendants include Marilyn Monroe, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Clint Eastwood and Hugh Hefner.